There are still quite a lot of those near the top of our site’s all time popularity ladder: Nokia N73, E71, N all sit comfortably in the top ten. Until then, we’ll continue to enjoy the sight of phones like the Nokia 6500 classic and 6700 classic. We have to mention here that despite the falling interest indicated on our chart, the number of non-touch bar phones sold worldwide is still huge and it will remain so until touchscreen devices get cheap enough for even developing markets to accommodate.

If that’s the way things are going we are not going to complain – technology is evolving and that’s the beauty of our job. Even the almighty Nokia Eseries are about to go touch so there is little hope really for non-touch candy bars staying anywhere near the high end. Touchscreen is all the rage now and it seems nothing can stop them take over the market eventually. Unfortunately for the classic and retro fans, the bar-shaped phones, much like the clamshells and sliders, were swept away by the touchscreen revolution and they lost much of their influence. The regular candy bar handsets were basking in popularity in that period, their weighted averages exceeding the absolute averages in every year save for 2005. They were briefly outpaced by the clamshells in their golden time and then returned on top in 2006 for three consecutive years. More than half of all announcements in the 2000-2003 period were candy bar phones. Bar-shaped phones are the oldest and most popular species in our database, accounting for almost half of the total.

Nokia candybar phone